The invention relates to a baby bottle for bottle feeding and other uses; a valve, applied to the wall of the bottle, permits regulating, by manual control, the quantity of air which must replace the drained liquid relative to the vacuum created by the sucking; a zone of the nipple has an automatically variable geometry to evaluate the variation of this vacuum during continued sucking.
For bottle feeding one now uses a transparent, graduated bottle of glass, plastic, etc., to the mouth of which a nipple is applied with or without a valve which lets air enter during suckling. It is evident that in the absence of this valve, as in the case of baby bottles with inserted nipple, the air can get into the bottle only through the holes in the nipple. In any case the milk comes out of the nipple by effect of the infant's sucking, and for the external air to enter the bottle he must overcome the vacuum present therein, which depends, among other things, on the height of the liquid column, on the sensitivity of the air valve when there is one, and on the size and number of holes in the nipple.
This circumstance results in disadvantages such as the ingestion of air, making the infant tired, the necessity to use nipples of hard rubber, the formation of foam due to the bubbling or air through the milk. Besides, the types of air valve used nowadays in baby bottles are difficult to understand for most people, do not allow a good regulation of the outflow rate of the milk, require for their regulation taking the bottle out of the infant's mouth, and do not permit evaluation of the degree of vacuum existing in the bottle during the entire suckling period and therefore do not permit either verifying whether or not the arrangement in which the baby bottle operates is adequate to the infant's needs.
It is the object of the present invention to offer a remedy for all these disadvantages. As characterized in the claims, it solves the problem of introducing air into the baby bottle also in the presence of a slight vacuum, continuously displaying and visualizing the variation of this vacuum which occurs in the bottle as a result of the continued sucking. This is obtained by providing the bottle with a manual valve, applied fixed or removable, in the lateral or bottom wall, and forming the nipple with a zone whose geometry varies as the vacuum exisiting in the bottle varies during suckling.
The advantages obtained owing to this invention consist essentially in that the amount of air which enters the bottle without bubbling or almost so is manually adjustable without interrupting the suckling; the variation of the vacuum in the bottle during sucking is automatically and continuously indicated without external intervention, constituting on the one hand a means of visual indication when and how to act on the air valve and, on the other, a means for controlling the effect achieved by the action on the valve as well as the entire arrangement in which the baby bottle operates in relation to the infant's needs; it is made possible to give foods denser than milk and also medications, whether liquid, in powder form or gaseous, with or without addition of air. The invention will now be further described with reference to the attached drawings, which represent only a possible and non-limiting embodiment.